Beauty as functionality… Arguably the most important S&S design of them all was the innovative and incredibly successful World War II DUKW amphibious transport vehicle. At the other end of the output was Dennis Miller’s beautiful, in the conventional sense, 42-foot Admiral’s Cupper Firebrand, part of the winning British team in the 1965 unofficial ‘world championship of offshore racing’
The relationship created by the partner-
ship between Drake Sparkman, a success- ful yacht broker only 10 years older, with Olin and Rod Stephens created a dynamic that worked well from the start. Drake had an established client base and if he couldn’t find an existing boat to satisfy his customers he would then ask the brothers Stephens to commission a brand new design to their requirements. But it was to be Dorade, design seven, that would cata- pult the young brothers, Olin and Rod, under the partnership title of S&S, to international recognition. Dorade’s successes sparked an extraor-
dinary run of designs. Ocean racers, Metre boats, one-designs, cruising yachts, day- sailers, motorboats and several designs that successfully entered production. Most notable of the latter was the Lightning which was drawn in 1938. At 19ft long, this centreboard dinghy would become their most successful production design with over 15,500 built. Also in 1938 came the larger 35ft Week-Ender class. Thirty- nine of these timber-built yachts were produced in only two years. This was all part of a run of no fewer
than 316 design projects completed before America entered the Second World War in 1941, bringing to an end the first S&S era. However, hugely successful production
runs of S&S designs were to become a mainstay of the commercial success of the business throughout Olin’s life. Then, as we have seen, the subsequent period of WWII was no less successful in terms of recognition with the acclaimed DUKW taking centrestage. With the ending of hostilities the third
Stephens era began in 1945 with the Pilot 33 – a simple small cruising design. But interest in racing yachts soon exploded, particularly during what were to become boom times for the USA, fuelled by a post war optimism throughout North America. Sparkman & Stephens were now centre - stage in what was to become their most
52 SEAHORSE
prolific design era with over 1,300 boats drawn between 1945 and 1966. This was also the era when S&S made
real and longlasting inroads into the Euro- pean sailing scene and other parts of the globe outside the USA. In 1965 Olin created what was to prove to be one of his favourite designs of all – the 42ft Fire- brand for British yachtsman Dennis Miller. Drawn to be a flat-out racing boat for Admiral’s Cup competition, Firebrand became a member of both the 1965 and 1967 British teams (perhaps symbolically, Firebrand was later purchased and cam- paigned by designer Ed Dubois). The fourth S&S era, from 1966 until
Olin’s retirement, might be deemed the separate-rudder period. Successful racing boat designers have to be adventurous, be prepared to push their ideas out and take chances and Olin was no exception, but he was also cautious about what he considered to be the key areas of design. From the out- set of the business in 1928 design mantra number one was that windward perfor- mance was the key to winning. Olin and Rod learned this lesson when, as kids, they spent inordinate hours seemingly tacking back and forth always over the same piece of water in the succession of boats bought by their father, Rod Snr, to introduce them (or not) to the joys of sailing! It was this desire to maintain upwind
superiority that kept Olin away from devel- oping the separate keel and rudder configu- rations that by the mid-1960s were proving so successful on the designs of Dutchman EG van de Stadt. It was only when fellow American designer Dick Carter won the Fastnet with his first design Rabbit in 1965, also using a separate keel-rudder configura- tion, that a whole new era of S&S separate rudder designs was unleashed. In point of fact Olin had already
launched a first cautious exploration of the separate rudder concept in the same year as Rabbit with the 36ft Gaia class. Nine- teen Gaias were built in Italy, but the
design was destined to become more famous when it was used as the first ever Swan model – the Swan 36. Nevertheless, this first-generation S&S
separate rudder design could almost be described as a full-keeler with a skeg-hung rudder tacked on. It proved, however, to be very fast but, more importantly, it opened the door for Olin to go seriously radical one year later with his 1966 One Ton Cup designs. Spearheaded in the UK by near-sister-
ships Roundabout and Clarionet, the fourth era of the Stephens brothers began with a bang. So fast were these two 36- footers that they were dubbed ‘The Terri- ble Twins’ by their fellow competitors. In both offshore and inshore races they regu- larly finished with, or ahead of larger, sup- posedly faster, Admiral’s Cup racers. Olin, at a stroke, had more or less halved the keel area compared to his earlier designs, and in the process not only reduced wetted surface, but actually improved that all important upwind performance. The Terrible Twins also embodied the first hints of the bustle, invented by Olin to help redistribute fore and aft displacement for potentially higher top-end speeds. The bustle, with the introduction of the
IOR four years later in 1970, would morph into an iconic piece of rating trickery. Meanwhile, closer to shore, this was
also the period when in 1967 the relatively staid world of 12 Metre design was revolu- tionised by Olin Stephens with the sepa- rated rudder and bustle concept on Intrepid – a seismic development that quickly filtered into all of the Metre boat classes. In part II, ‘Intrepid and beyond’, I’ll take
a more detailed look at the Stephens brothers’ remarkable role in the America’s Cup and the development of the 12 Metre itself, the weapon of choice in the America’s Cup from 1958 until 1987, and fittingly the ultimate development design type that in the smaller 6 Metre had first inspired them under the tutelage of Clinton Crane. q
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